09 November 2017 1:46 PM

I’m always delighted to be invited on to BBC Radio 4’s Moral Maze as I was this week (transmitted last night, 8th November, and to be repeated on , Saturday evening, 11th November. Or it can be listened to on BBC iplayer – see links at the end of this article). I am delighted because, when all is said and done, it is an intelligent and thoughtful programme, which makes some attempt at real balance and which often examines important issues in a serious way.

But I have mixed feelings, as I am hurried into the witness’s chair and hurried out of it for my brief few minutes (which seem to pass in seconds), as I cannot forget how very close I came to being on the panel of this programme, something I think I would have done rather well.

This happened long ago, when the legendary original panel, including Professor David Starkey and Rabbi Hugo Gryn, was breaking up and the then executive in charge was looking for new voices. I was told I was to be given a try-out, along with several other possibles. I then noticed that the others in the group were getting far more opportunities, more frequently than I was, and I complained that it was a rigged race. A friend in the BBC privately admitted that I was right, and that (although I was to be allowed to go through the semblance of a try-out, having been promised this) I had in fact been ruled out in advance.

I found out that a certain high executive, whose name I know, but whom I have never knowingly met, had vetoed my appointment. No reason was given though it was easy to guess that it was something to do with the profound dislike which many BBC people feel for me and my opinions, intensified by their near-adulation of my late brother - and my annoyance that I share his name and have a similar voice.

I then made inquiries of another even more senior executive, face to face, and was told (amongst other blunt things) that this was just so and would remain so. I might be member of the occasional panel programme, perhaps once or twice

a year. But that was that. This particular executive even told me I would ‘never’ present a Radio 4 programme (an assertion which I was instantly determined to prove wrong, and have since proved wrong more than once, though I think in a more just, fairer BBC I would have presented many more).

So here we are, on Wednesday evening in the nice old studio in elegant, history-filled Old Broadcasting House from which the Moral Maze is transmitted live (somehow I managed to miss seeing the new statue of George Orwell was has been hilariously misplaced next to the BBC - an institution which the great man did not especially like, and which nowadays would (I suspect) find him a considerable nuisance).

And off we go. I know the rules, and get a good run at my subject. I have no complaints. But who *is* this Matthew Taylor, director of something called the Royal Society of Arts (which used to supervise shorthand examinations when I was a lad). Mr Taylor is treating me as if I were some nutcase with a placard saying ‘THE END IS NIGH!’ who has been hauled in off the street to make the morally conservative cause look daft.

He tells me I ‘bemoan’ the things I don’t like. Well, would he ever use this verb to describe anything he (or his Blairite friends) said that was critical of current social arrangements? No, he wouldn’t. He’d say he was criticising them, or objecting to them. ‘Bemoan’ is one of these verbs , like ‘pontificate’ which is not used to show approval of the person who is supposed to be ‘bemoaning’ or ‘pontificating’. The very syllable ‘moan’ is a condemnation – look at the brilliant propaganda stroke of describing pro-EU persons as ‘Remoaners’, which instantly puts them at a disadvantage. If you’re ‘moaning’, you’re losing.

Then he refers to my ‘strong views’. Well, he’s not saying that as a compliment, either. Having views at all, in the Blairite Paradise Mr Taylor has personally helped to build, is a bit suspect. I mean, why aren’t you content? ‘Strong views’ is a way of saying ‘You’re a fanatic’, and he knows it. He did these things while not really engaging with what I was saying.

He later claimed, without any basis that I can see, that I and another witness did not ‘acknowledge the complexity’ of moral questions. If he means by that that we were not relativists, I’m happy to accept it. But the idea that I don’t recognise any complexity in moral matters seems to me to be unwarranted.

But then came the two moments that fascinated me, as, having left the studio, I listened to them back in the green room. Mr Taylor *and* Anne McElvoy both (within a very short time of each other) suggested that I was in the grip of (separate) conspiracy theories. They did this when I was absent and could not rebut the claim on air, as I should certainly have done if present. Ms McElvoy asserted that I thought the fuss about sexual harassment at Westminster was ‘got up by a feminist conspiracy’, a sentiment I have not expressed and do not hold to. Apart from anything else, if only feminists were involved in the frenzy, it would not have got anything like as far as it has. Frenzies are also very hard to start deliberately, and the thing to watch is what sort of people try to ride them, or urge them on, once they have got moving. It is the enthusiastic participation of many formerly conservative parts of society, politics and the media (much of it quite without forethought or indeed thought of any kind) which have given the whole thing its heft.

Within minutes, perhaps seconds, Mr Taylor (who was at primary school during the period of the Jenkins cultural revolution and perhaps, even despite having as a parent the great Cultural Revolutionary Laurie Taylor, not as totally aware of events as he might have been had he been a bit older) was accusing me of believing in a ‘Roy Jenkins conspiracy’.

I believe the use of this term is far worse than mere ad hominem abuse. It invites the listener to dismiss the opinions of the person so accused by imputing a delusional mental state to him. Although ‘conspiracy’ remains a serious legal charge, most people associate it with the unfortunates who think the CIA are sending radio messages to them, or bugging their inner thoughts, through their fillings.

So pervasive is this accusation as a means of discrediting perfectly reasonable arguments that I devoted a large part of my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’ to rebutting it. Things actually don’t always happen by happenstance , coincidence or iaccidnet. People do strive to bring them about, and they are not always wholly open about what they are up to. Why it should be considered crazy to believe this or point it out, I don’t know (though I can guess).

I point out there that a far better word for ‘conspiracy’ in modern England would be ‘lunch’ - the occasion at which politically interested persons most often gather to pursue common aims, in private (because open campaigns meet far more resistance than subtle, unacknowledged ones, as all lobbyists know).

In fact, they often don’t even need to do this. Much journalism is so incurious and preoccupied with the obvious, and the public are so poorly-informed, that campaigns can be pursued more or less in the open and most people will not know they are going on. Roy Jenkins, for instance set out his plans for moral revolution quite clearly in his book ’The Labour case’ published in 1959. I deal with this at length in my book ‘The Abolition of Britain’, and quote from Jenkins’s own autobiography in which he outlines what he calls his ;’stratagem’ His ally, Anthony Crosland, was similarly open in his 1956 book ‘The Future of Socialism’ . Anyone who wanted to know what the future held under a Labour government could read these volumes and be wholly unsurprised by what followed between 1964 and 1970. Hardly a conspiracy.

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07 January 2016 5:14 PM

It’s now plain that our supposedly super-accurate RAF bombers have done very little in Syria since the great Parliamentary vote on the subject. If the military need was so urgent, why is this so?

It seemed to me at the time and seems to me now that Parliament and the government’s regiment of media toadies were actually being invited to authorise raids on Jeremy Corbyn. The government also wanted to implicate us in some way in military action in Syria, presumably to make Saudi Arabia happy and to make deeper engagement possible later - if we can find a way of backing the pro-Saudi rebels who have done so much to turn Syria into anarchy and ruins.

But the ridiculous praise for Hilary Benn’s fatuous speech (regarded as Churchillian by the sort of people who think Downton Abbey is great drama), and the Labour applause for it, were the real victory. Had the Oldham by-election (the following day, on 3rd December) gone the other way, the Blairites in New Labour would have mounted a putsch against Jeremy Corbyn, and tried to recapture their party from its annoying members. This sort of thing has been done to the Tories, when IDS ( a far less competent leader than Mr Corbyn) was overthrown by a supersmooth, pinstriped putsch.

The timing of the Syria debate, in retrospect, looks rather suspicious. There was no special military or diplomatic reason, as is quite obvious now, for holding it that night. The only reason for hurry was the Oldham poll. There was nothing else on the grid that couldn’t be altered. A humiliation for |Mr Corbyn on Wednesday night at Westminster and another one on Thursday night in Oldham Town Hall, and the brave boys of New Labour would have acted.

Alas for Blairism, the people of Oldham didn’t do as the Blairites wanted. This, of course was immediately said to be in spite of Jeremy Corbyn, and not to his credit. If it had gone the other way, it would (I promise you) have been entirely his fault, and the people’s verdict on Corbynism.

David Cameron and his media helpers really, really want to destroy Jeremy Corbyn. Mr Cameron’s attitude towards Mr Corbyn at Question Time is one of real, venomous enmity. He ignores Mr Corbyn’s actual questions (this week those questions were by common consent pertinent and well-asked) and instead fans the undisguised and inevitable hostility between Mr Corbyn and his MPs.

Why does he do this? You’d think he’d want to keep Mr Corbyn there, if he’s as awful and useless as we are constantly being told.

On Channel Four News last night ( a programme which might once have been a good deal more sympathetic to Corbynism than it would now like to admit, having become a Blairite organ like all the rest) , there was speculation after the supposedly disastrous Labour reshuffle that we were heading for a one-party state, as Labour is now so enfeebled.

Again, you’d think the Tories would like that. But they plainly don’t. The identifiable sycophants of David Cameron in the media are dedicated to attacks on Mr Corbyn, attacks so relentless that you would think there was nothing else to write about, that the economy was fine (rather than poised on a precipice) that the NHS was perfect (rather than in increasingly deep difficulties) and that the Prime Minister’s attempts to escape his EU referendum pledge (a hopeless, illogical tangle) were going well. Not to mention disasters visible to me daily such as the hopeless delay on the electrification of the Great Western mainline, miles behind timetable and mountains of money over budget. Let’s forget HS2 and the Heathrow expansion, or the relentless slither towards a Scottish secession, and the utter failure of all attempts to control our borders.

No, the most important thing in politics turns out to be whether Mike Who swaps jobs with Brenda What, and if Stan Nobody has quit his non-job as deputy minister for Tramways and Fine Arts, in protest at the easing out of Albert Whatsit from his non-job as Shadow Secretary of State for Wind Farms.

Billed for weeks as the ‘revenge reshuffle’, it was supposed to be a sort of Westminster version of the Red Wedding in ‘Game of Thrones’, with the Shadow Cabinet corridor knee-deep in blood and littered with grotesque political corpses and the weltering, obscene figures of the dying, crying ‘treachery!’ and ‘murder!’ What, I wonder, was the source for this fantasy? I don’t think Mr Corbyn talks much to the Parliamentary Lobby, who he rightly recognises are not his friends.

The actual event (in which great crowds of reporters hung about stairwells and lift-shafts trying to find something, anything interesting to write about) involved Jeremy Corbyn boring a few colleagues half to death with conciliatory, polite conversations, and getting rid of a few people from (unpaid, unimportant) jobs because they disagree with him about major policy issues. Well, I never. A party leader who wants allies in his Shadow Cabinet.

Well, I never, a party leader whose authority comes from the old-fashioned left-wing party membership clashing with a new-fashioned left-wing Parliamentary Party whose authority comes from their endorsement by the media and the money men who decide who’s top in politics.

For the first time in my life, this country is actually coming to resemble the Marxist caricature of crude money and power, concentrated in a power elite, versus the disdained people – a caricature that has never hitherto been true at all and which does not prove that the Marxists were right.

For the power and the money are all lined up on the side of the revolutionary radicals of Blairism, whose origins (even if they don’t know it) lie in the raw pre-Lenin, (and pre-Kautsky) Marxism of 1848 - fanatical egalitarians ready to wreck the education of millions for an ideology , wild, dogmatic warmists ready to wreck our economy for the sake of their faith, flingers-open of borders at any cost, wagers of liberal wars and bombing campaigns, overthrowers of foreign governments which don’t conform to their desires, servile slaves of foreign authorities which accord with their desires, viciously intolerant promoters of the most all-embracing social and cultural theory since the Reformation.

To these people, now dominating the House of Commons, the media and the academy, Mr Corbyn is (paradoxically) an infuriatingly conservative person, who (for the wrong reasons, but never mind) keeps open the possibility that they might be wrong, and (worse) that they might one day be defeated by discontent. He thinks in categories they have long ago abandoned, nation, class and history. His old-fashioned good manners alone are a reproach to the modern go-getter who has none.

No, no, I don’t agree with him. Don’t get carried away. But they loathe him just as much as they loathe me – and for what is basically the same reason - anyone with a memory is an obstacle to their project

The only opposition they are ready to tolerate is one that doesn’t raise any awkward questions. They expect to beat Labour whoever leads it. But they don’t want the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition - still an implicitly influential position - to haunt them with memories of when this country had a genuinely two-party system and all that went with that. As Richard Neville said so perceptively right at the start of this revolution 50 and more years ago ‘There is an inch of difference between the two parties – but it is in that inch that we all live’ .

I think that’s it, anyway. I just felt like letting rip against all this humbug and garbage.

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21 December 2015 3:56 PM

I have often said that knowing anything about politics is a grave disadvantage if you want to set up as a pundit, especially (but not exclusively) when the Labour Party is under discussion. Most political reporters think and thought that Michael Howard, an incorrigible liberal, and the man who did more than anyone else to turn the Tories into a Blairite faction, was a hardline right-winger.

They think Blairism was Toryism. They thought Neil Kinnock’s attack on Militant was a right-wing purge of the party. Etc etc.

Alas, as a result, many of their readers, listeners and viewers also end up thinking these daft and untrue things, and are, as a result, quite unable to understand what is going on. It was to put this right that I wrote my book ‘The Broken Compass’, later re-engineered as ‘The Cameron Delusion’. The effect has been minimal.

Now the conventionally wise all think that Jeremy Corbyn is a wild leftist, steering a moderate and conservative Blairite Labour Party away from the safe centre. The way in which he is pilloried for his dealings with Irish Republicans is especially funny, given the Blair creature’s direct role in arranging a humiliating and wholly unnecessary national surrender to the IRA, who, having won almost all their demands, were allowed to keep all their guns and bombs, and exonerated for any atrocities which might happen after the surrender was signed, to make sure that they would be able to squeeze the rest out of us in due time. By their deeds shall ye know them.

I have to point out that I’m not a supporter of Mr Corbyn. He and I don’t agree about much, except the serial stupidity of our military interventions. This is not because we have a meeting of minds. We don’t. Mr Corbyn’s old-fashioned 1930s leftist attitude to war (learned from his old-fashioned leftist parents) accidentally coincides with my wholly different Christian view of it.

Modern leftists (which Mr Corbyn isn’t, but my late brother was, and which the Blairites are) love interventionist war as a means of imposing utopia. For them, the might of the liberal democratist USA, bringing ‘democracy’ to the world by bomb and missile, has replaced the vanished might of the USSR, and they worship it in the same way.

Mr Corbyn is old enough to recall the days when the left mistrusted the USA, and a kind of inertia keeps him thinking this way. At his age, he doesn’t want to reconstruct his entire philosophy.

There’s a lot of this sort of inertia about, on the ‘right’ and the ‘left’ . For example, as I make my way in and out of Paddington station, I often have jolly encounters with railway trade unionists, who are friendly towards me largely because of my attitude to Russia, though they also like my support for renationalisation of the railways, and my pluralist belief in union freedoms.

I feel it would be unkind and ungenerous of me to pick a quarrel with these pleasant people over the Russia issue, but I suspect they (just like the ‘New Cold War’ merchants) still cannot really separate Russia and the USSR in their minds (as I can, having seen the USSR collapse, close to) , nor do they distinguish between the USA of the Cold War and the very different post-Clinton USA of liberal intervention. They think my defence of Russia’s behaviour is a continuation of the Cold War. They don’t grasp that I defend Russia precisely because it is *not* the USSR any more, and criticise the modern USA precisely because it is no longer the arsenal of conservative liberty, and has turned instead into a globalist, ultra-liberal ideological state.

Anyway, all this is a preliminary to pointing out that my view of New Labour(and its Cameroon clones in the Tory Party) has been spectacularly vindicated by a Deep Throat from the heart if Blairism.

To the mockery of the conventionally wise, I wrote in the MoS on 9th August

‘Today's Tory Party is indistinguishable from Blairite New Labour, and is probably more Marxist in practice than Jeremy Corbyn is in theory.’

And I then wrote on 4th October, to yet more derision from the massed bands of received opinion: ‘Our political media never understood that the Blairites were in fact far more Left wing than Jeremy Corbyn. The Blair faction's ideas came from a communist magazine called Marxism Today. The magazine, in turn, got the ideas from a clever Italian revolutionary called Antonio Gramsci. He wanted a cultural revolution, a Leftist takeover of schools, universities, media, police and courts (and of conservative political parties too). That is exactly what New Labour did.

An astonishing number of senior New Labour people, from Peter Mandelson to Alan Milburn, are former Marxist comrades who have never been subjected to the sort of in-depth digging into their pasts that Jeremy Corbyn faces. Why is this? Is one kind of Marxism OK, and the other sort not? Or is it just that most political writers are clueless about politics?’

Ha! Sunday’s ‘Observer’ published the following article by Peter Hyman, a close associate of the Blair creature at the height of his popularity

'The [New Labour]“project” was infinitely more revolutionary than anything proposed by Jeremy Corbyn or his supporters'

The context is below.

I think it entirely vindicates what I have now been saying for nearly 20 years, and makes nonsense of the idea that Blairism was a form of Toryism.

‘New Labour was not intended merely as a short-term electoral fix after 18 years out of power and four crushing election defeats (though that would not have been a terrible thing), but as a radical new force in British politics. The “project” was infinitely more revolutionary than anything proposed by Jeremy Corbyn or his supporters. The idea of New Labour was not to be a good opposition party, to protest loudly or have an “influence” over events, but, rather, to take and hold on to the levers of power. New Labour sought political hegemony: winning power and locking out the Tories to ensure that the 21st century was a Labour century with Labour values in contrast to a Tory-dominated 20th century.

‘The scale of that ambition, in a country dominated by a stridently rightwing press and the quiet conservatism of large swaths of the British people, was breathtaking. If Labour could be in power for a serious amount of time, then the country would, we believed, change for good; not a burst of socialism for one time (if that), but changed institutions and values that could shape the country for all time.

‘The project worked at a number of levels. We told a story about Britain that was optimistic, tapped into people’s aspirations, stressed our tradition as a pioneering nation and showed how once again, through knowledge, know-how, new technology and networking, our creativity could help shape the prosperity and success of Britain in the future. We championed a society in which community and solidarity played a more important role – “giving” as well as “taking”.

‘We put forward a practical programme for government and new delivery mechanisms to ensure that policies were actually working on the ground. A plan to get the young unemployed back to work. A plan to end rough sleeping on our streets (now sadly back in big numbers). A radical plan to end child poverty in a generation. A plan to cut huge waiting times in the NHS both for routine operations and in A&E departments. A plan to get the trains to run on time. Through massive new investment and judicious reform, the infrastructure of Britain and the life chances of the poorest families improved dramatically. The case for an active, empowering state was being made. There was a moral imperative too: to rebuild the public realm, to shape a more tolerant, kinder society and to devolve power to the nations of Britain.

‘There were many mistakes, many messy compromises. To those who want to compare this imperfect Labour government with some Aaron Sorkin-scripted, West Wing-style fantasy, it was doomed to come up short. But the real comparison should always have been between an imperfect Labour government and a Tory government. For if Labour holds out for something pure and untainted by reality, if we pretend that there are black-and-white answers to complicated situations, then, as we are finding out now, the left is ruined.

It’s too easy to forget what life was like under the pre-New Labour Tory government or what it would have been like if they had continued in power. It was illegal to talk about gay relationships in schools; pupils still used outside lavatories in crumbling buildings; free-market Tories were urging the end of the NHS; while the government defended apartheid, foxhunting and the massive, unregulated profits of privatised utilities.

It’s also easy to forget just how much the centre of gravity of British politics has moved to the left as a result of New Labour.’

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30 November 2015 1:22 PM

Often in the past few days, BBC listeners and viewers, and readers of the unpopular newspapers, might have had the impression that Britain is discussing the pros and cons of an intervention in the Labour Party, rather than of an intervention in Syria.

As I read the papers and listened to BBC Radio 4 on Friday morning last week, I was baffled to find that the main item was not the plan for war, but the divisions on this subject within the Labour Party.

As it happens, the Tory party is also divided on the issue, as is the Tory press My newspaper, the Mail on Sunday, cautiously favoured bombing yesterday (Advent Sunday, 29th November). By contrast, our stablemate, the Daily Mail, said on Saturday 28th November that Mr Cameron had not made the case for war. Sir Max Hastings says he finds it hard to accept that bombing Syria will ‘bring us any closer to a happy ending’ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3335744/MAX-HASTINGS-die-cast-going-join-bombing-Islamic-State-Syria.html. Matthew Parris, generally sympathetic to Mr Cameron, wrote in the Times on Saturday (behind a paywall) that Jeremy Corbyn was right on this issue. Careful readers of the London press will no doubt have found many other reservations about bombing among normally pro-Government publications.

And Mr Cameron is extremely nervous of risking a Parliamentary defeat, as this might severely weaken and even destroy his position. I asked a 'Whitehall source' on Monday morning if there was any word about how the government planned to whip its MPs. There was (then) none.

I might add that, until the Daily Mirror obliged on Saturday morning, showing that there was no absolute majority for bombing, but that pro-bombers were close to 50% of voters and considerably more numerous than anti-bombers (normal at the start of any conflict, alas) I’d seen no attempt to discover the state of public opinion on the matter.

I woke on Friday expecting a variety of opinion and some through coverage of the Commons debate, mentioning the strong doubts about intervention voiced by MPs from all sides.

But that morning, all four major unpopular daily papers chose virtually identical headlines, and identical angles on identical stories.

As I noted in my Sunday MoS column:

‘All the four main unpopular newspapers had virtually the same page one headline on Friday morning: The Times: ‘Labour at war over vote to bomb Isis’, The Telegraph: ‘Labour at war over Syria air strikes’; The Guardian: ‘Labour in Syria Turmoil as PM makes the case for war’; ‘The Independent’ : ‘Labour at war over air strikes in Syria’. The BBC’s headlines were very similar.

‘None of these stories contained any clear facts, just anonymous briefings. If it had been a plane crash, or a verdict in a major court case, this sort of unanimity in supposedly competing media would have been normal. But in this case it looks much more as if we have a controlled press.’

And, I might have added, a controlled BBC, which from the beginning of the destabilisation of Syria has reported the government line (a noble and spontaneous rising by liberal-minded democrats against the uniquely evil tyrant Assad) without qualification or scepticism, rarely giving time to doubters.

By the way, I am grateful to Edmund Adamus for reminding me, on Twitter, of the extraordinary interview with Lord (Paddy) Ashdown, normally a part of the interventionist establishment, on the Radio 4‘Today’ programme, here

Lord Ashdown’s suggestions of reluctance by the Gulf States to take part in the war against ISIS, and of closeness between sections of the Tory Party and rich Arab individuals, are quite astonishing and in my view worthy of more attention than the internal struggles of the Labour Party – where Jeremy Corbyn’s bad relations with his Blairite MPs are about as surprising and newsworthy as a scowling match between Margaret Thatcher and Ted Heath.

The incessant concentration, especially by the BBC in almost every bulletin I heard over the weekend, night and day, on the Labour Party’s internal strife, seems to me to be a failure of impartiality. Little of substance happened to justify the intensity and sustained continuity of this coverage. It almost all stood upon unattributable briefings received by the reporter involved. Few of these stories (in one I heard it suggested that Jeremy Corbyn might ‘force’ his MPs to vote against bombing, something he has no power to do) rose above the level of speculation.

I tried to explain, in my 2004 book ‘The Broken Compass’, later re-engineered as ‘The Cameron Delusion’, the extraordinary power which the political lobby has over the coverage of politics in this country, and of how its own interests and fixed ideas (few of them are interested in politics in the way that I am. They function much more like show business or sports reporters, whose careers are hitched to the stars they write about) ensure that some things are lavishly, intensively covered and others (often much more important) never covered at all, or barely mentioned. I explained that this was not done in ‘conspiracies’ but at lunches and dinners where people privately agreed to pursue a common interest without appearing to do so. Which sounds so much nicer and more normal than a ‘conspiracy’ but is in fact exactly the same thing.

Nobody read it, and it made no difference, as usual. And so here we are again, on the way to war, and all anyone can talk about is the Labour Whip.

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04 June 2015 2:54 PM

Some of you may have noticed, in a recent debate on the election at Hay-on-Wye, a reference I made to John le Carre’s first-class novel ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’. I spoke of the ‘very clever knot’ described by le Carre and untangled by George Smiley, by which everything was made to appear the opposite of what it was.

It worked like this. The KGB agent who was actually debriefing the mole inside British intelligence was believed by MI6 to be a Soviet Traitor, the exact opposite of the case. Those who went regularly to meet this KGB man in a secret safe house in North London (surrounded by elaborate precautions) believed they were running a deep-penetration agent inside Soviet intelligence. One of this team of debriefers (you’ll have to read the book to find out which) was in fact an MI6 traitor, who thus managed to hold meetings with his KGB controller, on MI6 premises, at the British taxpayer’s expense and under the protection of MI6. His senior colleagues helped to provide cover for this traitor. The very boldness of the deception made it all the more effective. When it was exposed, the disbelief and fury of the duped was enormous. Had it not been for the detective genius of George Smiley, it might never have been exposed at all. Nothing is, but what is not. Everything is the opposite of what it seems to be. In that way, those who might act against it become its active and committed defenders.

Some remarks on Monday by James Harding, the head of BBC news, brought this to mind again.

The Daily Mail reported on Tuesday : ‘THE boss of BBC News has denied any trace of Left-wing bias despite a series of rows over its coverage in the run-up to the election.

James Harding insisted that the Corporation is always 'scrupulously impartial' and rejected as 'fable' claims that it is prejudiced against Right-wing parties.

However, he did admit to some failings, saying that the BBC had allowed political polls - which predicted some form of coalition - to 'infect [its] thinking'.

As a result, he said, they spent too much time examining which parties might do deals with each other instead of analysing their policies.

Addressing the accusation of bias, Mr Harding told a conference in London: 'I find this increasingly hard to take seriously.

'In the light of the Conservative victory, what's the argument? That the BBC's subtle, sophisticated Left-wing message was so subtle, so very sophisticated that it simply passed the British people by.'

Gosh, how witty.

But it depends entirely for its force on the idea that the Conservative Party is in some way ‘right-wing’. What if it’s not, and the BBC’s behaviour helped that party into office? Perhaps it was quite subtle. Then everything’s upside-down, and everyone’s doing the opposite of what they seem to be doing, aren’t they?

Now, as we have discussed here, the modern Tory Party is not conservative, and has not been for many decades, if it ever was. It is all but impossible to believe that it once contained, at its heart, such people as Janet Young, a committed and determined foe of the sexual revolution.

It is certainly *liberal* in economics, in culture and morality. Many politically unlettered people think of this position, associated with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, as ‘right-wing’. It certainly conflicts with the pre-1989 ideas of the political left, which until the end of the Cold War was still devoted to state ownership of large chunks of the economy.

This devotion, while essential to Soviet Communism, doesn’t actually have any particularly strong connection with Social Democracy. States which are largely Social Democratic, Germany, France, Scandinavia and the Low Countries spring to mind, seem to me to be quite pragmatic about state ownership of the economy, certainly more pragmatic than the 1945 Labour government were. For the Labour Party under Alastair Campbell to pretend to abandon (which they didn’t really) Clause Four of the old Labour rules, wasn’t a great step. In effect, Harold Wilson had abandoned nationalisation as a policy in the 1960s. I still meet people who think New Labour was ‘right-wing’, when in fact the ideas of New Labour came out of Eurocommunism, social and cultural radicalism stripped of Soviet impediments, and was crammed with former Marxists who weren’t all that former, which is why they don’t like it mentioned to this day.

The modern Labour equivalent of Clause Four is in fact comprehensive education, something David Blunkett repeatedly pledged never to abandon during the Blair years, and which he legislated to make compulsory in all new schools. This is because it is the absolute key and foundation of Labour’s commitment to ostensible egalitarianism, a position it will not abandon. Of course, its own leaders and rich supporters don’t believe in this, and are very skilled at avoiding it in their own lives. But they do very much want to impose it on the fast-declining independent middle-class, the main opposition to the strong state and the main defender of common sense against dogma.

Now we come to the very clever knot in British politics, the one which you must undo to grasp what is actually going on. For this, readers are strongly recommended to get hold of my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’, or its earlier hardback version. The Broken Compass’ (they are broadly the same but ‘The Cameron Delusion’ was brought up to date to deal with Cameron Toryism).

Read especially the early chapter ‘The Power of Lunch’ (the index, itself a work of art, will find the passage if you look up the name ‘Goslett, Miles’).

It recounts the failure of a Freedom of Information request, pursued doggedly by Miles Goslett, to obtain details of a meeting at the Palace of Westminster on 28th February 2008. The location is important because who went to see whom is also important in working out who was setting the agenda.

What we *do* know about this meeting is that it was hosted by David Cameron, then Leader of the Opposition, and his visitors were Mark Thompson, then Director-General of the Corporation, and Caroline Thomson(no relation – though ‘Thomson and Thompson’ reminds one of the two hopeless detectives in the Tintin books), at that stage the BBC’s chief political commissar. Caroline, whom I know slightly, is very well-connected in the left liberal establishment, especially its pro-EU wing. Her father was the former Labour MP, later Social Democrat peer Lord Thomson of Monifieth, her husband Roger Liddle, Eurocrat extraordinaire ( from 1997-2004 special adviser to the Blair creature on EU matters), who in turn became Baron Liddle of Carlisle in 2010 (his supporters were Lord Mandelson and Lord (William) Rodgers).

This was not a meeting about Tory policy on the BBC (Licence fee, Charter etc). BBC officials were having other meetings with the relevant Shadow Cabinet members about that.

This was, I believe, a meeting about the BBC’s policy towards the Tory Party. And that is why they won’t talk about it.

Round about the same time, some will remember, the conservative media were rather sceptical of Mr Cameron’s re-engineering of the Tories, and concerned that they had been cowed into liberal policies by a fear of the BBC as we see here in a (BBC) report of a rare speech by the editor of the Daily Mail:

‘I recently had lunch with the BBC’s Director General and I don’t think it’s breaking a confidence to reveal that he told me that their research showed that the BBC was no longer perceived as being anti-Tory. “That’s because you’ve broken the buggers”, I said laughing.’

He added : ‘Cameron’s cuddly blend of eco-politics and work-life balance, his embrace of Polly Toynbee – a columnist who loathes everything Conservatism stands for but is a totemic figure to the BBC – his sidelining of Thatcherism and his banishing of all talk of lower taxes, lower immigration and Euro scepticism, are all part of the Tories’ blood sacrifice to the BBC God.’

This is very perceptive. The re-engineering of the Tory brand in this period might have been (in my view almost certainly was) aimed at placating the BBC, the arbiter of orthodoxy and the gatekeeper of government. Suddenly the Tories were Greener than Green, metrosexual, Euro-friendly, comprehensive-friendly, equality-friendly, immigrant friendly. For many of them this was no great effort. The private opinions of the Tory upper deck have for many years been left-liberal, with concessions made at conference-time and during elections, during which these people try to appear to be conservative, by talking tough on crime, immigration, the EU, drugs, human rights, schools etc, in non-specific, non-committal ways which will never translate into real policy.

Even odder, in this instance, was that Mr Cameron (whose leftish sexual politics I explored and recorded in my lonely way in 2010, to the interest of nobody,

went ahead with the legalisation of same-sex marriage without putting it in his manifesto, a very clear sign that his real, true views are further to the left even than he confessed in his BBC-wooing period before 2010.

There’s also the excellent point made by my old adversary David Aaronovitch, in ‘The Times’ of 29th April 2008, that ‘Tony Blair's mission, unexplained even to himself perhaps, was to make it not matter whether the Tories came back, as they would be hemmed in by Blairism just as Labour was by Thatcherism’.

This may also have helped the BBC come round. But come round it did. In 1997 and afterwards, the BBC did not of course openly shout ‘Vote Labour’. It just used a lot of energy reporting on Tory ‘splits’ and rows. All parties are split, always, and generally these splits and rows remain minor unless exploited by active media coverage.

It also virtually ignored everything they said that wasn’t to do with a split or a row. Then the ‘split’ reporting faded, and indeed the splitometer was directed instead at Gordon Brown’s Labour government. Tory speeches and policy initiatives were reported more fully and more respectfully. The Tories had in short, been presented with the cloak of electability and Gordon Brown had been robbed of it. Only incredibly expensive, day-to-day, hour-to-hour monitoring across all the channels for years could actually demonstrated this, and who can afford that. It was done on the edge of a remark, or by nuance, timing. It wasn’t organised or directed. It was just permitted, when it previously hadn’t been, and everyone knew it. Conventional wisdom understood that the Tories were on their way back, and indeed went so far as to believe they could actually win in 2010, which *was* a physical impossibility. All this was helped by Gordon Brown’s unfashionably conservative manners and style of dress, his rejection of Blairite style, things that made BBC liberals less bothered about whether he won or lost.

The election of Ed Miliband, a second Brown, ensured that the Tories would continue to receive the blessings of BBC patronage. I wonder if, had David Miliband been picked instead, things would have been the same. I suspect not, though we shall never know. John Rentoul, of the Independent on Sunday, is a useful Blairite barometer on such things. I don’t get the impression he is especially grieved by the Labour downfall last month.

But that chance to reconnect the BBC with a Blairite Labour Party has gone. Labour is almost certainly done for now, because the Scottish loss has destroyed it as a national party, probably for good, while the Tory party has become New Labour. David Cameron truly is the heir to Blair, and UKIP can scrabble for the Noisy Minority which is all that is now left of a supposed ‘Silent Majority’ that, by staying silent and indeed endorsing its own destruction by voting Tory, allowed itself to be marginalised and defeated.

09 November 2014 12:02 AM

The mystery of sex education is that parents put up with it at all. It began about 50 years ago, on the pretext that it would reduce unmarried teen pregnancies and sexual diseases. Every time these problems got worse, the answer was more sex education, more explicit than before.

Since then, unmarried pregnancies have become pretty much normal, and sexual diseases – and the ‘use’ of pornography – are an epidemic.

It is only thanks to frantic free handouts of ‘morning after’ pills and an abortion massacre that the number of teenage mothers has finally begun to level off after decades in which it zoomed upwards across the graph paper.

In a normal, reasonable society, a failure as big as this would cause a change of mind. Not here.

If you try to question sex education, you are screamed at by fanatics. This is because it isn’t, and never has been, what it claims to be. Sex education is propaganda for the permissive society. It was invented by the communist George Lukacs, schools commissar during the insane Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, to debauch the morals of Christian schoolgirls.

It works by breaking taboos and by portraying actions as normal that would once have been seen as wrong. Last week we learned that the Government has officially endorsed material which says sex at 13, ‘for those of similar age and developmental ability’, is normal.

This is, no doubt, a point of view. In a free society, people are entitled to hold it, even if it is rather creepy. But do you want your child’s school to endorse it? And how does it square with our incessant frenzied panic about child sex abuse?

If we are so keen on the innocence of the young – and I very much think we should be – then surely this sort of radical propaganda is deeply dangerous. We do not give schools this huge power over the minds of the young for such a purpose.

How odd it is that we teach 13-year-olds to go forth and multiply, but can’t somehow teach them their times tables. Shouldn’t it be the other way round?

What is it about Theresa May? She is walking proof that nothing succeeds like failure. She is herself a militant, politically correct liberal, oddly reluctant to admit she went to a grammar school.

Crime is out of control, inefficiently concealed by fiddled figures. Immigration is out of control, a fact that can’t be concealed. She can’t even organise a public inquiry. Yet her media sycophants portray her as a steely guardian of the State, and a potential premier. I ask you.

Here’s another conundrum. A party leader is losing by-elections, is hopelessly low in the polls (as he has been for years), is daily exposed as having no serious policy on the EU (the biggest issue that faces him), recently nearly lost Scotland and slighted the Queen, and is directly personally responsible (thanks to his attack on Libya) for one of the greatest humanitarian disasters of modern times.

And yet he is treated with continuing respect, while his rival (whose problems are small by comparison) is constantly smeared in the newspapers and on the BBC as being ‘not up to the job’ and under threat. Please explain. I can’t.

The honest British Peeler - killed off by Robocop

This appalling picture of a modern ‘police’ officer is yet more evidence that we have forgotten what the police are for.

If London is really so dangerous that it has to be protected by heavily armed men, then let’s admit it, and deploy the Army on the streets, with perhaps a few tanks or armoured cars at major junctions.

Soldiers are, after all, thoroughly trained in firearms, and are less likely than the police to shoot innocent people in unfortunate accidents.

Who would approach this ludicrous clattering figure, loaded down with killing machines and shackles, for help? He is the exact opposite of the sort of unarmed and unassuming constable Robert Peel wanted when he invented British policing.

The real joke is that the pretext for this macho display is the need to protect soldiers from maniacs. What a strange country, where soldiers need to be protected from civilians by civilians.

Have drugs dodged the blame again?

The whole country was puzzled by the dreadful case of the schoolboy who coldly murdered his teacher, the lovely and irreplaceable Ann Maguire. Countless people in the media called the crime ‘inexplicable’.

I also have no explanation. But I think we might have tried harder to find one. I have made a study of such killings, and have found that in almost all cases where the facts are known, the culprit had been taking mind-altering drugs, sometimes legal, sometimes illegal.

Two very powerful interests don’t want this link investigated. The first is the billionaire lobby for cannabis legalisation, which knows that the drug from which it hopes to make an even bigger fortune is correlated with serious mental health problems. It fears that wide knowledge of this fact will torpedo its campaign.

The other is the giant pharmaceutical industry, which is already garnering tremendous profits from ‘antidepressants’, and does all it can to counter any suggestion that these dubious and inadequately tested pills might have unpleasant side effects.

But that doesn’t explain the inertia of my own trade, journalism. Nor does it explain the seeming lack of interest in this among the police. Two things strike me about the boy involved. One is that he is at the age when many children are exposed to cannabis, and at the age when this drug has sometimes been connected with severe mental illness.

How many British secondary schools can truly say that this drug does not circulate in their corridors and classrooms?

The next is that the day after the killing in Leeds, it was reported by two newspapers that the boy had at some stage taken antidepressants.

I asked West Yorkshire police if they had looked into either of these possibilities. Had they asked his GP about antidepressants? Had they inquired at the school about his possible cannabis use?

Despite repeated requests, they have not given me a specific response to either of these easily answered questions. They have stuck to a bland and unrevealing formula – that the possibility was ‘looked into in detail’. But then they have declined to go into any detail about what that ‘detail’ was.

What a pity. You won’t find anything unless you look for it. Is it too much to ask that we at least examine this possibility properly? And is another schoolboy in another city quietly – and preventably – turning himself into an ‘inexplicable’ killer? I fear so.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

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10 September 2014 1:30 PM

Before setting out one or two possibly over-optimistic predictions, I thought I would look back at some of the things I’ve said recently about the Scottish issue. Back in April, I wrote : ‘Have we yet even begun to realise what a huge change may overtake us in September if Scotland votes for independence and Britain ceases to exist? Silly threats about the pound, the economy and defence simply don't work. I hope they wouldn't work on us either. They actually increase the pro-independence vote. So why do we keep making them? I for one am sure that the High Command of the Tory Party actively wants Scotland to leave. It is the only way the Conservatives, who like office above all things, will ever get a majority at Westminster again. You don't think they are that cynical? Why ever not?’

I had written : ‘I think we have lost Scotland. I felt it the other day, a disturbing sensation like that moment when the tow-rope parts, the strain too great for its rotten, decayed fibres to bear. The sulky, puzzled feebleness of the London politicians' arguments sounds desperate and defeated. Alex Salmond has already won the September referendum. Tell the Scots they can't keep the pound, and they'll just think quietly: 'Oh, yes, we will. Try and stop us.' And just imagine the reaction in a Scottish home when a friend or a relative phones from south of the border (as urged by David Cameron) to persuade them to vote against independence. Laughter would be the kindest response.

As for the Prime Minister's threat to take the whole Cabinet to Scotland, the actual sight of this squad of third-raters and phonies on the streets of Glasgow or Stirling should make a Nationalist victory certain. What has Scotland to fear by declaring independence from this unprincipled, mumbling shambles? As it happens, I am more grieved about this approaching divorce than most Englishmen will be. My earliest childhood memories are of the lovely coast of Fife, of Scottish voices and Scottish landscapes. I even like the sound of bagpipes.

And I grew up, in a Navy family, in that bleak but cosy era soon after the war, which had brought us all together in a warm Britishness that has now evaporated. I think we belong together, are stronger together and could defy the world together if we wanted.

But this does not stop me seeing what has happened. And I am amazed that so few have noticed the real problem. The leaders of the United Kingdom cannot argue for Scotland to stay in a country they themselves are working so hard to abolish.

Mr Cameron's allegiance to the European Union (which is total and unshakeable) automatically makes him the enemy of the Union of England and Scotland.

Let me explain. The EU's purpose is to abolish the remaining great nation states, carving them up into 'regions' that will increasingly deal direct with the EU's central government in Brussels.

Paris, London, Berlin, Madrid and Rome are allowed to retain the outward signs of power. But it is a gesture. All the real decisions are already taken elsewhere, from foreign policy and trade to the collection of rubbish and the management of rivers. Under this plan, England itself will cease to exist. The European Parliament gave the game away a few years ago by publishing a map of the EU in which all the regional boundaries were shown, but the word 'England' was not mentioned. Meanwhile, the smaller nations of Europe are indulged by the EU, because (unlike the big countries) they are no threat to it. They are happy to be allowed a flag, an anthem, a well-paid political class, a little pomp and circumstance - and no real power.

Like many of the EU's smaller members, Scotland is not big or rich enough to be truly independent. It can never hope to have its own free-floating currency, or its own armed forces capable of projecting power - the true indicators of sovereignty.

In truth, 'independence' will mean that Edinburgh becomes a cold vassal of Brussels, instead of a warm friend of London.

But since London itself has surrendered so much of its power and independence to the EU, this isn't the major change it would once have been. If Scotland is going to be run from Belgium anyway, why let the power and money flow through London, rather than direct to Edinburgh? Britain has given up its own national independence and sovereignty without a struggle. It is not a proper country any more. Having betrayed our own flag, we can hardly ask the Scots to be loyal to it.’

The key part of this prophecy , apart from the rather early prediction of a ‘Yes’ vote, was this: ‘The leaders of the United Kingdom cannot argue for Scotland to stay in a country they themselves are working so hard to abolish. Mr Cameron's allegiance to the European Union (which is total and unshakeable) automatically makes him the enemy of the Union of England and Scotland.’

I stick with that – though paradoxically the current last-minute melodrama of polls actually makes a ‘Yes’ vote slightly less likely than I thought it back on the 16th February. When I wrote that, the ‘No’ campaign were serenely confident and relaxed. Now they’re neither. I suppose it’s just possible that they may yet swing it with the argument that independence is irreversible. But then again, that may well be wishful thinking. We'll all know soon enough.

Anyway, let’s look at what happens if there actually is a ‘Yes’ vote. For a start, most of the scare stories will turn out to be just that. It’s the same with the scare stories we are fed about what would happen if Britain left the EU. Just as the EU would have no rational interest in fouling up a major market and close neighbour, England would have no interest in causing an economic and political crisis in Scotland.

So we would sort out some sort of currency union, make a reasonable agreement on the debt, and use what influence we have in the EU to ensure that Scotland isn’t forced on to the ramp that leads to the Euro, or into Schengen. Since there’s no precedent for a part of an existing EU member separating from that EU member, I expect compromises can and will be found.

These - the Euro and Schengen - are in fact the major dangers, and ones we can do least about. They’ve featured only slightly because the ‘No’ campaign is full of pro-Brussels figures who don’t feel happy drawing attention to the ferocious demands the EU makes on new members. Those demands rather give away the truth about the EU’s real nature, that it is a political superstate which strangles the independence of its members, who have often been inveigled into it 'democratically' with empty and dishonest elite campaigns in which the truth ahs been carefully hidden and denied.

In fact, the whole debate about currency union has completely confirmed what I and other anti-Euro campaigners said, to hoots of derision and feigned incomprehension, back at the end of the last century. He who controls the currency controls the country. I suspect Alex Salmond is quite happy with the outward forms of independence for now, while he consolidates his position. As long as Europe remains reasonably peaceful and prosperous, a symbolic toy nation can look and feel exactly like the real thing. Scandinavia proves this all the time, its nations passing in and out of subjugation or domination by nearby powers, as circumstances change - and everyone being too polite to mention this. Even Swedish neutrality in World War Two turns out to have been a bit dubious, with German troops actually allowed to cross Swedish territory.

As with Ireland, Scotland's crucial point of separation will come much later when the issue of currency does arise – for I am quite sure that, whatever is agreed this year and next, Edinburgh will come under relentless pressure to join the Euro. If ( see below) England leaves the EU, that pressure will be huge.

But that takes us into even more fascinating territory – the future of the former UK (acronym problems will force us to think of another name for what’s left) .

And that’s the start. If Scotland goes, can Wales be far behind? And then what about Northern Ireland, whose principal Unionist connection with the UK has always been with Presbyterian Scotland, not with Anglican England?

We shall need to think in a wholly different way. What a good opportunity, by the way, to abandon plans to update the ludicrous and useless Trident ‘deterrent’ (whom does it deter, and from what?) . And to lay aside our delusions of grandeur in the Middle East and North Africa. What is lweft of 'democratic' Libya’s ‘parliament', I see, has now retreated to a Greek car ferry moored (for the moment) at Tobruk. This may soon be the last territory it controls.

WARNING: May contain traces of SARCASM: David Cameron’s genius for nation-building in the Maghreb is, if anything, even greater than his genius for nation-maintenance here at home.

England, having rather notably failed to sort out its own internal problems, would for some years to come have a built-in excuse for standing back modestly from the problems of others, and that, to me at least, would be very welcome. For many years now our pose as a major power has been absurd, even laughable. Might we lose our seat on the UN Security Council? I suspect that was bound to happen anyway. We might have to relearn, instead, the ancient art of alliances, based upon interests rather than airy principles we don’t actually believe in anyway. A tough and cynical foreign office, like those of the First Elizabeth and Queen Victoria, would flourish outside the airy platitudes of the UN.

I have to confess that, though I have attempted to defend ‘Britishness’ as an idea and a nationality for many years, and remain scornful of St George’s Day celebrations and calls for an ‘English Parliament’ (we have one already, though badly in need of reinvigoration), a part of me thrills to the return of the word ‘England’ to its old force and power. Queen Elizabeth’s Tilbury speech before the Armada, ending ‘but I have the heart and stomach of a King ….and of a King of England, too!’ always makes me want to leap to my feet and cheer. I used to know by heart John of Gaunt’s dying speech ‘…this earth, this realm, this England’, and I think I had better get round to learning it again. In recent years I’ve tended to emphasise the bits about ‘pelting farms and rotten parchment bonds’ and ‘shameful conquest of herself’ . It would be nice to have the silver sea back, serving us ‘in the office of a wall. Or as a moat defensive to a house, against the envy of less happier lands.’

For the really exciting possibility of all this is that a newly manoeuvrable, realistic and thoughtful England might just choose the opportunity to abandon the dead political parties which have brought it to this state, and to leave the European Union – not through empty promises of rigged referenda, but through proper debate and Parliamentary majority after an election in which the issue was properly tried between articulate and honest opponents. . This is, after all, the only way we can regain control of our borders, our territorial seas, our economy, our trade, our foreign policy and our law.

And if it works (as I think it very much would) it will be very interesting to see how the other former members of the ex-United Kingdom respond to our independence. They might want to come back.

Of course it’s much more likely that the dead, nationalized parties will survive, now supported by the EBC ( a set of initials we’ll all be learning, if Mr Salmond gets his ‘Yes’) and our political elite and their tame media will instead inveigle us into balkanizing ourselves into regions, and turning our backs on hope and freedom.

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20 November 2013 2:46 PM

I’ve been distracted from worthier tasks by a strange article about me in today’s ‘Independent’ newspaper, which in all probability very few of you will have seen (though for reasons that will become obvious, it’s attracted quite a lot of attention from the Twitter mob).

I’m told off for not ‘following’ anyone on Twitter. My response is to misquote poor Polonius’s (excellent) advice to Laertes in ‘Hamlet’ , and advise everyone else ‘Neither a follower nor a trender be…’

As readers here well know, I regard Twitter as a left-wing electronic mob. I go there to respond to the stupid and ignorant attacks made on me, and to publicise this blog. I have plenty of ways of keeping up with the opinion of others, such as reading books, reading the papers and the weekly reviews, listening to the radio, conversing with family, colleagues and friends, speaking in debates. How 'following' someone on Twitter can even begin to compare with, let alone be better than, or supplement these things. I cannot think.

I’ve said here before that Mr Rentoul is a very useful writer, because he embodies the true spirit of Blairism, and his warm love for David Cameron, and his dislike for Ed Miliband, tell us much of what we need to know about what we must now (thanks to Nick Boles) refer to as the National Liberal Party. Tony Benn would say of him, I think, that he is a signpost rather than a weathercock, a man who sticks to his positions whichever way the wind blows, and doesn’t mind a bit of derision.

Even so, he is a bit young (born in 1958) to understand my political positions, and has perhaps lived in too rarefied a world. I read in Wikipedia that he worked for the small-circulation left-wing weekly ‘The New Statesman’ before going to the BBC, and then to the Independent, perhaps a rather restricted encounter with the University of Fleet Street. He also wrote a biography of the Blair creature, which I would describe as broadly sympathetic.

Anyway, to Mr Rentoul’s article. I really don’t know how he can claim I’m ‘not very interested in other people’s opinions’. For a start, I’ve *held* most other people’s opinions in my time, having been a supporter, in the mid-1960, of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and later of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and the Anti-Apartheid movement, then a member, in turn, of the International Socialists (1968-75), Hampstead Constituency Labour Party (1977-1983) and the Conservative and Unionist Party, Oxford East Association (1997-2003). I still belong to Amnesty International (despite its absurd involvement in campaigns to save murderers from execution in the USA), which I must have joined about 30 years ago. I am also a member of Liberty, and was in the late 1970s a member of Friends of the Earth, not to mention various organisations for the promotion of cycling (an enthusiasm, from which I have never shifted). I have been a member of the National Union of Journalists for about 40 years. All these things cause me to pay frequent and constant attention to the opinions of people who disagree with me. I am a confirmed and communicant member of the Church of England. I might add that since my university days I haven’t considered a day complete unless I have read at least four national newspapers, and preferably more. I’ve chosen twice to live abroad, once in the USSR and once in the USA, and in both places sought to immerse myself in the local culture and to learn, as deeply as possible, how they do things differently there. I’ve visited 58 countries, and have there sought out the opinions of prominent and influential people.

But I have never joined a club, despite two kind invitations to do so. In the end, despite the lovely Edwardian surroundings, the cosy bars, the warm feeling of being in a John Buchan thriller or an Evelyn Waugh novel that such places provide, I could never quite bring myself to do it.

I think that may be what irks Mr Rentoul - my unclubbableness and unwillingness to be part of any committed faction. I did sort of try this during the late 1990s, and found it didn’t suit me, though I also learned from it just how hopeless the Conservative Party really is.

Some of us are and always will be cats that walk by themselves. It doesn’t mean we don’t like other people, or aren’t interested in them, just that we’re happy on our own and uncomfortable in crowds or gangs.

His little sneer about book reviews shows how uninterested he is in *my* opinions. I’ve explained a thousand times how an occasional appearance on the seat on the edge on ‘Question Time’ is actually a confirmation of my marginal position in broadcasting, not evidence of my acceptance by the BBC mainstream.

As I sought to explain to him (though he plainly wasn’t listening) , the key to influence in British politics is to have an audience that stretches beyond your natural supporters. I don’t need to persuade Mail on Sunday readers of the virtues of patriotism and faith, or of the disadvantages of the cultural revolution. I badly need to persuade the others, and for that, I need at least a hearing. The drowning of my books in silence or ignorant abuse is, in my view, a conscious refusal to allow me that hearing. Most of the Left do not even know what *kind* of book ‘The Abolition of Britain’ is. They think it is a sort of nostalgic ramble, imagine it is of no possible interest to them, and would mostly be amazed if they ever opened it.

Likewise, the point of the conversation about social democracy has passed him by. He misunderstands my reasons for not being on the Left any more . I’m sure he hasn’t read my book ‘the Broken Compass ‘ (republished as ‘the Cameron Delusion’) in which I explain this . As it mostly wasn’t reviewed, he’s probably never heard of it. If he has, he probably has a skewed idea of what it’s about.

He also probably doesn’t know how important Arthur Koestler, who identified strongly with the German Social Democrats in later life, was to ex-revolutionary socialists, as a bridge from Bolshevism into civilisation. Koestler had been hated by the Nazis. Now he was hated by the Communists. That, in the century of the Stalin-Hitler pact, was about as big an honour as a man could hope for.

People like me didn’t abandon Bolshevism because we wanted to grind the faces of the poor, leave the sick untreated and roofless, trap the poor in ignorance, or force half-starved peasants to work 90-hour weeks in sweatshops. Nor did we abandon it because it didn’t suit our careers to be seen as openly declared revolutionaries. We abandoned it because we loved liberty and hated lies, and because we saw that Bolshevism actually did grind the faces of the poor, smashed independent trade unionism, destroyed freedom of thought and erected citadels of privilege as bad as anything in the capitalist world, if not worse. I might add that it was often guilty of racial discrimination.

In my long, slow progress from what I was to what I have become, one of the key moments (it’s in ‘The Broken Compass’) involved paying attention to the opinions of the British TUC, and then travelling to Gdansk, to pay attention to the opinions of Lech Walesa, then the incredibly courageous leader of Solidarity. I still remember with total clarity that foggy, dankly cold morning in the scruffy Hotel Morski, the interview interpreted by a young student to whom I remain everlastingly grateful, who had happened by great good luck to be in the building at the time. That frozen, thrilling, frightening journey was made by me not as a foreign reporter but as a Labour Correspondent, because I had gone to my then editor, a wonderful, modest and generous man called Arthur Firth, and said that the most important industrial story of the age was the Polish shipyard strike against Communism. ‘You’re right. Go there. Get the visa’, he replied. I went. It changed my life. Here was the right to strike, as contentious and as menaced as in the days of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, being wielded by a poor electrician who was a blazing radical for liberty, and a solid religious conservative on every other issue you cared to name. He tested this combination in action – and it worked. That seemed good to me, and still does.

I was gripped, from then on, by the huge melodrama unfolding in the Warsaw Pact countries (I’d already had a much gentler taste of it on holiday in Prague). I was amazed at how uninterested most people were in this vast convulsion. I paid attention to that paradoxical part of the world, of ‘real existing socialism’, of what it really involved, and I weighed everything and everyone by their attitude towards it. Marxism had not failed because it had been tried in the wrong place by the wrong people, as the Gramscians and the Euro-Communists (who are the intellectual fathers of Blairism) believed. It had failed because it was fundamentally wrong. I knew, from my own adventures with Trotskyism and from my own hard experience of that lost world of the Evil Empire, exactly why. Very few people had both these experiences. My great failure is that I cannot seem to explain this to my own generation, possibly because it is just too obvious to me. Or possibly because they don’t want to know.

Mr Rentoul is right that I don’t think the Blair creature is in the Koestler tradition. He isn’t in any tradition, so far as I have ever been able to discover (and I did have some slight access to him before he was famous) . He was valuable to the New Labour project precisely because he was not that interested in politics, while his wife was a worry to them because she was, and could (if you looked carefully) be identified with the cultural and moral struggles which now define the New Left. That’s why I got into such trouble for taking such an interest in *her* opinions, and daring to research her forgotten campaign as a Labour parliamentary candidate in Margate in 1983.

Pretty stodgy, eh? You can see why someone like me might not be that worried that he was missing Chris Heaton Harris’s Twitticisms.

One other small thing. Micah Clarke ( as Mr Rentoul would find if he read that rather good and neglected book) was never a sectarian and always viewed these matters with a broadminded good humour (thanks to his interesting upbringing and childhood).

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30 September 2013 4:17 PM

It is very sad, but some people may actually be influenced by the argument that a UKIP vote at the 2015 election will put ‘Red Ed’ into Downing Street. Of course it will. That’s the whole point of doing it, a negative action misrepresented by expressing it as a positive one. You can’t keep Tweedledumber out without putting Tweedledumb in. There is no facility for electing no government at all (though given their performances lately, whyever not?). You do it because you really don’t much care who wins, and why should you? You want to punish someone.

I , for instance, am not one of those who say there’s absolutely no difference between the parties. I actually think that Labour wouldn’t have dared to smash up the armed forces the way the Tories have done. It’s a sort of Nixon and China point, not a moral plus for Labour. But it’s a fact. And I am astonished that the intervention of two ex-soldiers at the Tory conference on Sunday did not get more coverage than it did.

Did those present not see that they were witnessing a gigantic earthquake of Krakatoan proportions? A Tory Defence Secretary heckled by moustachioed and medal-hung ex-soldiers, for cutting the armed forces? And this in the days of supposedly total security, when all dissenting opinion is sniffed out and excluded, and none but the vetted get within a furlong of the conference hall? Lucky for the Tories that these decent old coves went quietly. If you want to know why the Tories are bound to lose, then there’s your answer. If they can alienate such people, they’ve alienated their deep core. Yet the sketch-writers seemed more interested in a tawdry stall of Thatcher knick-knacks.

I was reminded of the curious events at a Tory rally in Blackpool in October 1958, recalled at length in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’ (first published as ‘The Broken Compass’). At this event, supporters of the League of Empire Loyalists were violently ejected from the hall for heckling Harold Macmillan. They were expressing or defending positions (on immigration and the winding up of the empire) similar to views that had quite recently been expressed by none other than Sir Winston Churchill, in the Cabinet Room of Ten Downing Street.

Which raises the amusing question of the Tory party’s incessant parading of Sir Winston as their exemplar and hero for the past 60 years or so, and conjures up the mental picture of the old boy being summarily ejected from a modern Tory Party conference by stone-faced stewards with plastic badges, to be handed over to ‘Security’ staff and then passed on to modern police officers with pepper sprays, Tasers and the usual paraphernalia of baseball caps, sub-machine guns, visible handcuffs and flexi-batons. Never in the field of human conflict, I’ll say.

Several distinguished journalists - no friends of the Empire Loyalists (no more am I) - were appalled at what happened to the Empire Loyalists on that long-ago Blackpool Day. They perhaps didn’t realise the real significance of it.

The Tories have always been ruthless in the pursuit of office, but the late Reginald Bosanquet, then a reporter for Independent Television News, testified later in court that the violence used against the Blackpool hecklers had been ‘excessive’. So did the late Bernard Levin, who said he had seen one of the hecklers marched into a room by uniformed stewards, whereupon ‘I heard cries and the door was repeatedly banged from the other side. When he came out he was very distressed’. Mr Levin also testified that the man was bleeding heavily from the nose, and his shirt was torn. This was, in a way, the Tories’ version of Labour’s far gentler ejection of Walter Wolfgang from their conference many years later. But it is largely forgotten because nobody much liked the Empire Loyalists, whereas old Walter was quite appealing.

This sort of thing really cannot happen now, thanks to TV, and I must admit, thanks to the Internet, which would spread images of it around the country so quickly that it would be politically impossible.

But I think it showed, even then, the truth – that the Tories had entirely accepted, by 1958, the Fabian reordering of Britain between 1945 and 1951, not to mention this country’s epochal defeat and humiliation by the USSR and the USA at Tehran, Yalta and Bretton Woods, and were prepared to enforce the change with all necessary ruthlessness.

Now they have entirely accepted the Blairite (ie EuroCommunist and Gramscian) reordering of the country between 1990 (the true beginning of Blairism) and 2010, and the German reordering of Europe since 1989 . And Michael Howard (the man laughably believed by some to be a ‘right-winger’, who created David Cameron and hugely centralised power in his party) and David Cameron himself were prepared to go to amazing lengths to reinforce this.

Their greatest enemies, in this project, are the loyal members and voters of their own party, who must be bullied, cajoled or otherwise persuaded into voting for and supporting governments which are hateful to them. The loathing is mutual, which is why I recently said on television that David Cameron did many of the things he does because he hates his own party. Of course he does. It's his job.

There’s only one answer to people who are wholly ruthless in the pursuit of office – and that’s to deny them office with equal ruthlessness. They will suffer far more from this than the voters will suffer from putting the ‘wrong’ party in office. Who (on either side of the political divide) thinks there has been any vast difference between the Coalition or the Blair-Brown, in their effects on daily life, living standards or human freedom? Or foreign policy? Or anything else?

Those who didn’t like the Labour Party under Neil Kinnock, and so abstained or voted for other parties in 1992, were not so thick that they didn’t grasp what their actions would bring about. Lo, John Major, perhaps the most unlikely victor in British electoral history, became Prime Minister. It wasn't that anyone much actually wanted him. It was that they didn't want the other one (much the same process put Ted Heath into Downing Street in 1970, after the famous 'unpopularity contest' between him and the by-then-discredited Harold Wilson).And the Labour Party was, for good or ill, forced to change, into something rather like John Major.

UKIP voters (and if you feel you must vote, which I don't, that’s the way to do it) can hardly believe that Nigel Farage is the national future. Even Mr Farage (and all credit to him for grasping it) knows that is not going to happen. But he also knows he can do a lot of mischief, and his latest plan, to offer individual Tories UKIP support, is very mischievous. It's absolutely not a pact(which would destroy UKIP) . But it could force a lot of blowhard 'Eurosceptic' Tories to show what they're really made of, or more likely what they aren't made of.

These UKIP supporters may genuinely hope to change the Tories, though the only way to change them is to destroy them utterly and replace them with almost anything else, perhaps a blob of plasticine. I mean, anything, anything would be better than this intellectually and morally bankrupt rump of deeply unattractive, ignorant and not-very-bright persons. Game of Thrones? More like a Game of Drones.

There’s a good chance that a Tory failure in 2015, especially if combined with Scotland voting to stay in the Union, will bring about the long-needed split and collapse of the Conservative Party. Scottish secession is in fact David Cameron’s only remaining hope of a Westminster majority. I am baffled and flummoxed by the number of commentators and politicians who claim, with straight faces, that the Tories can win an absolute majority in May 2015. On what polls are they basing this? It is virtually unknown for a governing party to increase its vote or share of the vote after five years in government – the March 1966 election, in which Labour got its absolute majority, followed a sort of probationary period of 18 months in which the voters decided (foolishly) that Harold Wilson was to be trusted after all. The 1983 Tory election triumph was brought about by the Falklands, and the 1987 one by the Alliance splitting the left utterly.

UKIP voters, many of whom feel as I do that the whole purpose of their vote should be to punish the Tories, need to go a step further. They should seek to destroy the Tories, so knocking down the great wall of flannel and conventional wisdom that keeps this country from discussing its own future, or influencing it. So what if ‘Red Ed’ gets in? Or a Lib-Lab coalition? Will you really be able to tell the difference? But five or ten years afterwards, we might have a proper British government again, which quite possibly may not happen, but will certainly never happen as long as the Tories survive.